Features November 2017

Landscapes of the heart

A review of Housman Country: Into the Heart of England by Peter Parker.

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In 1943, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, a classical scholar and future Head Master of Eton, was a prisoner of war working on the infamous Burma railway. He lost an eye, suffered kidney failure, and endured unimaginable hardship. Among other ways of retaining his sanity, he mentally translated a number of A. E. Housman’s poems in A Shropshire Lad (1896) into Latin, including a version of what is possibly Housman’s best-known poem:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining...

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